25 March 2020 – As country after country adopts stricter measures to combat the spread of COVID-19, our listeners want to know what to expect in a lockdown. Abbey and Darshan speak to Oxford scholar, Andrea Ruggeri about his experiences, the impact on Italian democracy and daily life. And yes, Andrea advises buying…

  20 March 2020 – As Europe shuts down in response to the spread of COVID-19, other African countries are just beginning to grapple with the early signs of the pandemic. In this show, we discuss the COVID-19 response in South Africa, where an impending winter, a long history of the HIV-AIDS pandemic, and xenophobic…

April 24 2017 – Francois Bonnet. Emmanuel Macron has emerged as the frontrunner in the first round of elections for the French Presidency. Though, the leading story of the night was the success of Marine Le Pen of the National Front Party in securing second place and an opportunity to participate in the run off…

April 3 2017 – Michael Onyebuchi Eze. Three weeks ago, Loren Landau conversed with us on how poor, black South Africans use violence to demand the attention of political elites. In this week’s rejoinder Michael Onyebuchi Eze argues that it is more a symptom of a nation much too stuck in its frozen transition to…

We’re wrecking Dutch culture: One day you will thank us for it An open letter from an immigrant to Mark Rutte Hi Mark,  Sorry its taken me so long to respond. I decided to wait because in your letter you seemed, well, so upset. And my response to your whining was never going to make…

March 27 2017 – Sarah de Lange. Whereas the international media has been mostly concentrating on the perceived electoral rivalry between Rutte and Wilders during the last Dutch elections, a more interesting note might be the rise of parties that, for example, represent the ‘migrant vote’. Though this signifies the increasing tendency of governmental fragmentation in…

March  13 2017 – Loren Landau. South Africans have been rioting against, attacking and murdering foreign nationals since the end of Apartheid. The past month has seen another upsurge of this type of violence. While most have attributed this violence to a deep-seated South African nativism, in this week’s podcast we speak to Loren Landau in…

November 14 2016 – Austin Kocher In this episode we come back to the conversation we had last March with Austin Kocher – PhD student at the Department of Geography of the Ohio State University – on how a possible Trump Presidency would affect US immigration policy. As we all know, against all odds Trump…

November 7 2016 – Claudio Minca As the authorities have recently fulfilled their mission in clearing the infamous Calais Jungle Camp, once home to some seven thousand migrants and asylum seekers, we in this week’s talk speak with Claudio Minca – Professor and Head of the Cultural Geography chair group at Wageningen University (WUR). Instead…

September 26 2016 – Sandrino Smeets European leaders recently met in Bratislava to sift through the ashes of Brexit and chart the organization’s way forward. Migration and asylum dominated the agenda with their Declaration vowing “[n]ever to allow return to uncontrolled flows of last year”. This week we asked Sandrino Smeets – an expert on EU…